msmtp, Lightweight Personal SMTP for Linux Server Admins

msmtp, the Personal Sysadmin SMTP Server

February 8, 2011

By
Joe Brockmeier

Linux server admins rely on email notifications to keep tabs on servers. A full-blown MTA like Postfix or Exim is overkill, so try the lightweight msmtp.Last week, I covered OfflineIMAP to sync IMAP for use with Mutt or other applications. Continuing with that theme, I want to talk about another tool I use with Mutt to handle the opposite problem -- actually pushing mail to an SMTP server. Let's take a look at msmtp.

Mutt is a fantastic mailer for admins, but it doesn't do SMTP. It expects that to be done by an Mail Transport Agent (MTA). Usually, this is something like Sendmail or Postfix, and that makes sense when they're living on the same system. But it comes to running Mutt on a laptop or desktop, many admins have better things to do with their time than to set up a full-blown MTA. You may not even be running your own mail services in-house, so why dust off the Sendmail or Postfix documentation just to set up a personal MTA?

Actually, you can configure msmtp on the user level or the system level -- so if you want to set up a very lightweight Sendmail replacement for a system, msmtp should do the job.
Setting Up msmtp

Most Linux distributions should have packages for msmtp. If not, it's available under the GPLv3 (or later) and available on Sourceforge.